Gender Intelligence

Barbara Annis, Keith Merron

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062307422
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

World-renowned experts on gender intelligence Barbara Annis and Keith Merron suggest it's time to move beyond arguments based on politics and fairness, building an economic business case for gender diversity in the workplace.

Despite forty years of laws, quotas, diversity training, and legal expenses aimed toward equalizing pay, opportunities, and working conditions between the sexes, the glass ceiling remains firmly intact. For too long, companies have played the "numbers game"—attempting to tackle gender imbalance by forcing affirmative action policies and numeric standards on organizations to increase the representation of women in management. Yet, these efforts have rarely been sustained.

In this groundbreaking comprehensive analysis, based on more than twenty-five years of in-depth surveys involving 100, 000 men and women across dozens of Fortune 500 companies, Barbara Annis and Keith Merron provide a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of forces that have combined to create and perpetuate gender inequality. Gender Intelligence exposes common false assumptions that prevent men and women from successfully performing together at work—myths exacerbated by worn-out theories of gender blindness and sameness thinking. It show how a small but growing number of courageous, leading-edge companies have broken through the barriers to successfully advance women, making the remarkable transformation from compliance to choice—from pressure to preference—and show how it can be done in any business.

Gender Intelligence features 17 illustrations.

Part One

A New Conversation

1

Gender Intelligence

There’s a different conversation taking place today between men and women in the workplace—a transformational conversation that’s altering the landscape of business and how we’re addressing gender diversity at work. After decades of ineffective finger-pointing and quotas, a revolutionary and effective approach has come into focus for men and women leaders, one shaped by a greater understanding of our gender differences and the value revealed when we engage those differences instead of trying to ignore them.

This awareness is stirring, growing stronger every day, in North America, Europe, and in organizations around the globe. On an individual level, this new approach is improving communication between men and women. It’s resulting in more effective problem-solving, in a dual-sided approach to innovation, decision-making, and in increased satisfaction at work and at home. Company-wide, this revolutionary approach is offering organizations significant strategic and economic advantage over companies that are not yet awake to its profound potential. While other businesses are stuck in conventional wisdom, these organizations are moving forward with confidence into the ever-more-competitive global market, able to leverage fully the efforts of every leader and every member of their teams.

And we need a new approach now more than ever. Consider the amazing social changes that have transpired over the last fifty years compared with where we stand today. In education, we’ve seen a tsunami of women attaining university and graduate degrees in virtually every country on the planet; in many of those countries, women have been surpassing men since the 1980s.¹ This flood of ambitious women seeking careers and starting businesses of their own doesn’t show any signs of receding. More and more women hold important leadership positions in top companies and in governments alike. Yet, after so much time and effort, one would think that women would be near to an equal level with men in career opportunity, compensation, advancement, and attainment of leadership positions. They are not.

The sobering reality is that although women now represent 50 percent of the workforce, from entry positions all the way through middle management, women have done no better than to secure about one out of every five senior management positions and only one in ten CEO or board-level posts.² After more than forty years of trying to break the glass ceiling, all we’ve done is push it up. What have we been doing wrong?

The answer is clear! In the past, we’ve operated from two fundamental beliefs. The first is that balanced gender representation should be achieved in business, government, and education. To achieve that goal requires viewing both genders as identical on the inside. The reach for equal representation has been a tangible and worthy demonstration of our search for gender equity, to be sure. However, we’ve found that equalizing the numbers doesn’t necessarily result in true gender equality or in creating the gender balance we were seeking. Similarly, many believe that treating everyone the same will eradicate bias, another move toward gender equity. Our research and experienc show that this is hardly the case. What if the solution isn’t eliminating the differences between men and women themselves, but instead learning how to recognize, value, and leverage those differences?

Many companies who call on us have come to the realization that the focus on sameness and equality in representation has done little to produce meaningful change in the upper echelons of the organization. They’re finding that quotas don’t get them to gender diversity, and that gender diversity doesn’t automatically make them become gender-intelligent. And even after setting those quotas, they’re not making them. After targeted recruiting and hiring of more women, the companies are simultaneously losing them. Yet too many are still holding fast to their beliefs, suspended in an ineffective but politically correct paradigm. The question is, what’s causing their denial?

Our Collective Limiting Belief

That women are leaving is evidence of the fact that the organization, especially at the top, is not providing a culture that allows for effective collaboration with their male colleagues and that contributes to the women’s success and ultimately the organization’s success. The reason why the glass ceiling still exists has more to do with organizations not providing a welcoming environment for women than anything else. The natural way in which women’s voices are expressed is not part of the model for success for women at the top—a model based primarily on the way men think, communicate, and act.

The standard explanation as to why women haven’t advanced into the top ranks is often rationalized as work-life balance. And while many men cite this as the primary reason why women aren’t progressing (and sometimes ultimately quit), it’s not entirely their fault for making that assumption. Women perpetuate this myth by citing “personal” as their reason for not throwing their hat into the ring for a higher-level position or when submitting their resignation. To call out the real reason, they fear, might burn important bridges, damage their professional networks, and possibly eliminate the possibility of returning.

Men assuming women simply don’t choose to pursue those top positions and women reinforcing that assumption has fostered our collective limiting belief that work-life balance explains the “woman problem” that continues to plague major corporations throughout the world. From our experience working with hundreds of companies attempting to solve these problems, both of these assumptions are incomplete. In fact, they’re not even close. Yes, work-life balance is an issue for many women all over the world to varying degrees, dependent on support, means, country, and culture. But our research and experience show that work-life balance explains only a small part of what’s really going on. The lion’s share is the lack of a blended conversation at the top of the corporation and the inability to utilize the differences between the genders for the organization’s collective advantage.

Contrary to popular belief, when women quit, most aren’t completely opting out of the business world. Many leave to join up with the competition or start their own businesses, and in record numbers. Many people think that this is so they can have greater work-life balance, but this is rarely the case. Instead, they are seeking to be a part of—or create on their own—working environments that value their ideas and contribution and allow them greater self-expression. Women-owned businesses in the United States have been growing at twice the rate of all privately held firms since the 1990s. And the same seeds of self-determination have taken root in Latin America, Europe, and Asia as well. Worldwide, women now own or operate a third of all private businesses, and this percentage is growing at a faster rate than that of private businesses owned by men.³

So when we combine the limiting beliefs of gender sameness and diversity of numbers with the misinterpretation that women leave primarily for work-life balance reasons, we arrive at a place where organizations can’t take advantage of the greater gender potential that lies in blending the best of what women and men can uniquely offer. Assumptions abound and a unique and powerful opportunity is lost.

Fortunately, a growing number of leaders and their organizations are forgoing this narrow focus and breaking these tired old patterns of thinking. They are uncovering the value of gender difference, not sameness; they are embracing diversity in thought, a more powerful and productive goal than numbers of men versus numbers of women. They are understanding the powerful business case to be made for this approach as the source of improved problem-solving, better decision-making, and greater productivity. They are realizing, for the first time, that the path to creating healthier, more effective, more balanced organizations is not just through the advancement of women, but by understanding, valuing, and blending the contributions of men and women together. They are growing in their Gender Intelligence.

We are at the crest of a paradigm shift in thinking—a tipping point in our understanding of the nature and direction of gender equality in the twenty-first century—and Gender Intelligence is the leading edge of that understanding.

What Is Gender Intelligence?

For decades, IQ was viewed as the sole measure of a person’s intelligence. Society placed all its emphasis on educating people to improve their logical reasoning, math, spatial skills, use of analogies, and verbal skills.

What was puzzling, though, was that while IQ correlated with academic performance to some extent, it did not correlate nearly as expected with professional success. While at the extremes, there was some relationship to success (at lower IQ levels, for example, people don’t perform as well), in the middle and higher levels, it did not predict professional success at all. Clearly, there was some missing factor. There remained those men and women with great IQ scores who were not achieving their goals in life nor advancing in their careers. In some way, they seemed to be thwarting their potential by thinking and behaving in ways that hindered their chances to succeed.

Around thirty years ago, social scientists figured out what that missing element might be in the success equation. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is a concept formulated by psychologists John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey during the 1980s and made popular in 1995 with the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman. Emotional Intelligence describes the ability to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one’s self and of others. Although EQ went a long way in expanding our idea of intelligence by adding in the emotional component, it didn’t go far enough in distinguishing the underlying characteristics by gender, including vital pieces like how we communicate, how we respond to social cues in our environment, and how we respond to and manage stress.⁴

Enter Gender Intelligence, an idea we find to be an exciting expansion of the complex conversation around predicting and maximizing potential, not just in our interpersonal dealings, but at the team and organizational levels as well. In the following chapters, we hope you will also begin to see what this more complete and gender-balanced notion of intelligence, one more revealing and inclusive of the differences between the genders, can bring to our personal and organizational success.

At its core, Gender Intelligence is an understanding of and appreciation for the natural differences between men and women that goes beyond the biological and cultural to include variations in brain structure and chemistry that influence thoughts and actions. Gender Intelligence is the awareness that gender differences are first informed by nature, then influenced by family, education, culture, and environment.

Gender Intelligence doesn’t come to a person by ignoring or tolerating gender differences or to an organization by pursuing a quota. Nor does Gender Intelligence require that men and women give up their authenticity in order to get ahead. A company doesn’t become gender-intelligent by simply enforcing diversity compliance policies, offering flexible work programs, or creating women-only networks or interest groups.

Instead, Gender Intelligence comes from understanding and appreciating the unique talents and skills that men and women bring to the table and how their natural complement can improve the productivity, innovativeness, and economic growth of the organization. It teaches us that once we’re aware of how and why men and women generally think and act as they do, we can begin to understand each other’s natural tendencies as well as our own. We can begin to engage the other gender more effectively in the workplace and feel the effects ripple out to touch our personal lives as well.

As men and women come to understand each other’s ways of thinking and acting, they step up to a new and powerful level of conversation. They stop tiptoeing around differences and are freed of their frustration. As they understand and appreciate each other’s unique contribution, they begin to include each other more confidently and more willingly, and uncover the hidden value in their differences. This is where we begin to see the true transformational nature of Gender Intelligence. Not only are conflicts and miscommunication minimized, but women and men alike engage in a more open, expansive conversation that produces powerful results. Internal teams display enhanced problem-solving and decision-making skills as they fully utilize what each gender brings to the table. As Gender Intelligence infuses throughout the organization, turnover decreases, performance improves, and the company forges better connections within the marketplace.

In the time we’ve been advocating for Gender Intelligence and supporting Fortune 500 companies in their leadership and cultural transformations, we’ve witnessed the blind spots that are deeply ingrained in the minds of men and women and in the cultures of organizations alike. These perceptual obstructions delay and even prevent the transformation from gender sameness to gender-intelligent thinking. The good news is that the blind spots are easy to target and are fixable. Just being aware of them can start you on your own path toward Gender Intelligence.

Our Biggest Gender Blind Spots

Through survey results of more than 240,000 quantitative and qualitative statements collected from men and women leaders and managers across the globe over the past twenty-seven years, we’ve amassed a wealth of information about the differences in the thoughts and actions of men and women. From that data, we’ve identified a number of blind spots. Gender blind spots are the incorrect assumptions held by men and women that cause “accidents” of miscommunication and misunderstanding and help maintain the statu...